Old House

I’m trying to remember summertime as a kid, which makes me think of my house in Wilsonville. Someone else lives there now and I find it kind of hard to believe, or picture really. That house was built for my family when we still lived in California. We lived in it completely. I miss it, though I’m not sure why, exactly. That house holds good and bad memories, but I remember being kind of ashamed of it at times. It was a little older, a little more run-down—or that’s what I used to think anyhow.

I moved bedrooms in that house. From being a year old to being twelve or thirteen (twelve, I think) I lived in the bedroom between my brother Greg’s old room and the back corner bedroom. When I was really young the walls were painted white and had a pink bear cart-wheeling along the border of the ceiling. When I got a little older, I redecorated and disliked it from the day it was done. The top half of the wall was a dusty blue and the bottom half was a light mauve and separating the two colors was a strip of wallpaper (one of those border things) with flowers on it. I had long curtains at the window that were held back with sashes. I thought it would have a princess feel. I hated it. So, in my twelfth year I moved to the front corner bedroom. I painted it light blue and stamped light yellow stars and moons along the top of the walls, in a border. The whole room was decorated in stars and moons. I liked this better. That room had a window seat. The window seat was indented into the wall, like a rectangle of plaster was just taken out and pushed back. It was a great place to sit and read or think or whatever—even though it wasn’t padded, so you got uncomfortable pretty quickly.

I miss the yard of that house. We had a garden and grapes and a raspberry bush and various fruit trees at various times (cherry, apple, pear, peach, plum, apricot, and the ever-abundantly producing fig). In the summer it was sometimes my job to water the fruit trees. This meant putting the hose on each tree (each tree had a small well dug around it) for ten minutes (fifteen?). Since we had anywhere from 4-8 trees, this could take a while. When I was a little older I would set the oven timer and watch “Regis and Kelly” as I waited. When I was younger I’d keep my mom’s wrist watch with me and sit in a chair in the midst of the trees and read.